Two weeks ago , I had to recover from a sizable power outage. When this happened, my first priority was to make sure that all of my virtual machines were running well. Once I had done this, my next goal was to get Hyper-V Replica back up and running ...

Power outages are not infrequent where I live (something I find quite confounding – to be honest) and earlier this week we had an extended power outage and my Hyper-V servers were powered off uncleanly. When the power returned I had to sit down...

Here is a neat little snippet of PowerShell: Get-VM | ?{$_.State -eq "Running"} | Get-VMNetworkAdapter | Select VMName, IPAddresses If you run this on a Hyper-V Server it will give you a listing of all the IP addresses that are assigned...

Something neat that you can do in Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 or later is to export a virtual machine checkpoint. You can do this by either: Selecting the checkpoint in the UI and selecting Export from the action pane Using the Export-VMSnapshot...

If you look at the advanced features of a network adapter in Hyper-V, you may have noticed the NIC Teaming option below: And wondered what this was about. In most deployments you will enabled network adapter teaming in the host operating system, and connect...

Dynamic memory is a great feature that allows Hyper-V administrators to get better utilization of their physical memory. But it can be hard to tell what is going on from inside of a virtual machine. There are, however, some things that you...

I was recently given an interesting challenge. I was asked to show how you could use PowerShell to import a virtual machine; where the virtual hard disks were stored in multiple different locations. Now, if the virtual hard disks were all...

If you start digging into the advanced settings section of a virtual network adapter – there is a lot of interesting stuff to look at. Today I’m going to talk about the DHCP guard setting: This setting stops the virtual machine from making DHCP...

After displaying event logs , virtual machine health and storage health – the last thing that is included in my daily status email is usage data. For this I take advantage of the built in metrics functionality that is part of Hyper-V. Looking at this...

Now that I have talked about displaying event log information and virtual machine health information; the next part of my status email is storage health information. In my experience – the most common failure for my servers is a failed hard disk. ...

Yesterday , I introduced my daily status email. Today I am going to talk about the first chunk of information that is included in this email: event logs. The primary goal of my status email is to let me know if anything has gone wrong. By...

Update 7/20/2015: This script is now available on GitHub at http://github.com/BenjaminArmstrong/Hyper-V-PowerShell/tree/master/Daily-Status-Report .
I have spent a fair amount of time creating a reliable and resilient Hyper-V deployment in my house...

One of the new features in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 is the concept of a protected network: In Windows Server 2012 R2 any network adapter that is added to a virtual machine is automatically configured as a protected network adapter. This...

We have recently published a new version of the Hypervisor Top Level Functional Specification for Windows Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1. You can grab a copy here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/B/4/AB43A34E-BDD0-4FA6-BDEF-79EEF16E880B/Hypervisor...

I have been spending a lot of time this week looking at all the functionality that is available in the Compare-VM PowerShell cmdlet in Hyper-V. The core concept of Compare-VM is that it returns a “virtual machine compatibility report” that lets...

So far this week I have shown you how to register and how to import virtual machines with configuration problems using PowerShell. However, the question I most often hear is this one: how do I use PowerShell to live migrate a virtual machine to...

Yesterday I stepped through the process of registering an incompatible virtual machine with PowerShell . But what if you want to import the virtual machine instead of registering it? Well, the process is pretty much identical. Replace...

If you have ever tried to register a virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager, and the virtual machine was not compatible with your current computer, you would have seen something like this: This is a GUI experience that allows you to make changes to the incoming...

Here is the scenario: You have a bunch of server virtual machines that are merrily running somewhere in your environment. Normally you do not interact with them, but once in a while you need to login to one of them and do something. When this...

Yesterday I posted about how Windows 8.1 / Windows Server 2012 R2 allow you to export a running virtual machine. This is also available when using SCVMM 2012 R2. Here you can now clone a running virtual machine. When you clone the virtual...

One of the small features that we added in Windows 8.1 / Windows Server 2012 R2 is the ability to export a virtual machine that is currently running. Using this feature is simple enough, just select a running virtual machine and choose to export...

You can only resize the virtual hard disk of a running virtual machine if: It is a .VHDX file It is connected to a SCSI controller These restrictions mean that people often ask me if you can resize the boot disk of a virtual machine. And the answer...

This week I have been talking about how to resize a VHDX on a virtual machine that is currently running. It is easy to think that you can only increase a VHDX of a running virtual machine, but you can also shrink the VHDX of a running virtual machine...